Truly, you would quite enjoy this show if you could suspend any form of logical thinking for about 8 hours.

The announcement that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina would be coming to an end with its fourth season was met with sadness and outrage from fans - outrage that shows like Riverdale remained on-air while CAOS was abruptly cut short. Eventually, fans made their peace with it and looked forward to the show going out with a bang.

Granted, the show did bow out with a bang but more like the kind you hear after leaving your three-year-old in the kitchen for like two seconds.

Since Part 3 of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the coming of the Eldritch Terrors (“older than the oldest gods”) came up again and again, and again. Father Blackwood went through so much to get the terrors to come to Greendale (like sacrificing his teenage children); they were teased like the big bad wolf, even badder than Papa Lucifer that gave the whole coven headache in Part 3. 



The Eldritch Terrors finally came to town but they were kind of a joke.

There were eight terrors – The Dark, The Uninvited, The Perverse, The Endless, The Weird, The Cosmic, The Returned, and The Void – each of these baddies were defeated rather easily, before the end of each episode. So much so that Sabrina had the time to fret about her love life while dealing with the Terrors. They were barely life-threatening - with Sabrina defeating one by pretending to date him, have some type of feelings for him, and marry him only to trap him in a dollhouse – all within like 10 minutes.

While the Terrors were running amok threatening the end of all things, Sabrina still had time to carve a fake boyfriend out of wax and grow him in her bathtub just so she could have someone to snuggle in public. Oh to be young and stupid.

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The Contradiction that is Sabrina

Part 4 starts off with Sabrina whining that the world has moved on without her because her friends have their boyfriends and her exes have their new girlfriends. So what does Sabrina do? Under her auntie’s guidance, she fakes a threat with the help of Salem (who finally gets to do something magicky, yaay) just to get the attention of her friends. The thing is, when a real threat comes to town, Sabrina couldn’t be bothered. She wants to run for class co-president and grow a boyfriend.

This teenager let her other self, Morningstar, stay back in  hell, so she could spend time drinking milkshakes with her friends but when she finds out the Queen of Hell is having the time of her life, she’s suddenly not so sure she made the right choice. To be plain, Sabrina only wants to be wanted and the minute she’s wanted, she wants something else.

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Keeping Up with Lilith & Lucifer.

Last season when we left Lilith, she was pregnant for Lucifer which made the latter stay his hand on her execution. In Part 4, Lucifer and Sabrina Morningstar go on a tour of Hell and Caliban (Sabrina Morningstar’s newly wedded husband) decides to make a grab of power by going after Lucifer’s heir. He does this by speeding up the growth of Lilith’s baby and putting her in premature labor. Instead of simply bursting with a baby like Caliban and the fools – I mean kings – of Hell expected, she runs to the Coven of Hecate and her baby Adam is delivered safely. The Kings run after her and one of them ends up dying by pain of childbirth (hilarious!)

Now wouldn’t it have been easier to, I don’t know, take a knife to the clay i.e. Lilith’s belly?

When Lucifer finds out Lilith is hiding her son, he goes for the baby, and rather than hand him over, Lilith kills her own child for whatever bizarre reason. Lucifer, outraged, curses Lilith with mortality. And this is where things get truly interesting.

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Filled with grief, and repeatedly hearing the cries of her dead child, Lilith seeks to end her own life and asks her failed killer, Caliban to get her the Spear of Longinus that kills immortals. This brings up an important question:

If Lilith is now mortal, why does she need a magical knife to end her life? Wouldn’t a regular knife do?

Still alive, Lilith sells out the coven that helped her in time of need in order to get her immortality back but unsurprisingly Lucifer couldn’t be bothered about returning it so in a fit of rage, Lilith stabs him with the Longinus Spear, drinks his blood, then curses him with mortality. An incredibly roundabout storyline that brings up another important question:

Where on Earth was this knife when the entire Coven was trying to immobilize Lucifer and instead opted for trapping him in a flesh Acheron – first Nick and later Blackwood? Questions, questions.

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The Threat that Never Came

From the moment in Part 3 where Sabrina went back in time to warn herself of Caliban's treachery thereby creating a time loop and two Sabrinas, she got repeatedly reminded and so did we, that having two of her self was extremely dangerous and could create some kind of alternate timeline which would probably bring the end of the world, as do nearly all threats n Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. But the presence of two Sabrinas had very little effect on the plot besides giving the showrunners two main characters to martyr and maybe the opportunity to dip a toe into the world of the original, Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

The specific threat from having two versions of Sabrina never came even as she became best friends and had a dance party with herself. The  Cosmic Terror was going to come anyway seeing as Faustus Blackwood had been plotting to bring them to Greendale since the beginning of Part 3.

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While we are on Blackwood, can we talk about the small-mindedness of this man who has repeatedly come into great power only to be treated as a joke and then cast aside?

Blackwood gets to make a wish, any wish, of the Perverse and he chooses to make himself an Emperor of Greendale – a very, very, small town and then goes around quizzing high school students on his own birthday. Seriously?

To make matters worse, he was significantly mocked by The Terrors he called forth which is maddening because Blackwood only seems to be portrayed as a formidable warlock when the show needs him to bring forth another baddie or complicate Sabrina’s life. After that, he’s back to being a big joke so much so that for most of this season, he was portrayed as far less competent than high school teacher, Ms. Wardwell

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Glamorizing Suicide.

In some type of ridiculous and pointless twist, Sabrina ends up sacrificing her life to save the world from the Void and in a bid to show his love for her and how he can't live without her, Nick kills himself so he can join her. This is quite a disturbing plot which is painted romantically in the final scene (with the soft light, gentle music, and romantic backdrop) and which Nabrina shippers are taking as some kind of win.

“What’s important is that we are together here... forever and ever” Nick says to which Sabrina responds ‘” that is a  plus”. Well I don’t know about that seeing as there will be no sex demons for Nick to get an edge off when he and Sabrina get into an inevitable fight.

 

Some other noteworthy ridiculousness in the series finale:       

  • Mamba Marie isn’t who she claimed to be. She is actually a male spirit, a Gede Loa named Baron Samedi who for some reason, absolutely had to return to the Underworld with The Returned. This whole faux twist had zero effect on the plot except maybe to show that Zelda is once again, betrayed by her lover.

  • Zelda once had a familiar, a dog named Vinegar Tom, who she considered her soul mate, an important tidbit of information that went unmentioned until Sabrina needed it to unscramble her auntie’s brain.

  • Do the members of the Church of Night actually believe in anything because they seem to change gods rather easily? From the Dark Lord to the Dark Mother to another Dark Mother.

  • Turns out Caliban might have been playing Sabrina Morningstar but no one ever gets to find out.

  • The storyline about Robin and his friend who sneaks into their bedroom in the dead of the night because Robin will stop being a hobgoblin if he remains in Greendale was totally unnecessary. Especially as he kept coming back.

  • That scene where all three couples – Roz & Harvey, Robin & Theo, Nick & Sabrina – were all making out in public, at once, in the same space, side by side each other. What was that, orgy lite? 

 Side notes:
  • Since Ambrose (played by Chance Perdomo) stopped wearing pajamas and lounging around the mortuary under perpetual house arrest, every single one of his lines is delivered one way – he either sounds like he’s in a hurry or in a lot of pain while Sabrina (played by Kiernan Shipka) delivers all her lines very emphatically.

  • The Void’s domain kind of looked like a set for one of Dua Lipa’s videos.

What did you think of the series finale of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina? Share your thoughts.